NEW YORK — We may all be fabulous creatures in our own heads but, heaven forfend, we are doomed by the brevity of our individual lifespans to keep repeating the same mistakes. How could any sentient being spend eight more hours in the relentless, prophetic, aggravating company of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and conclude otherwise?

Funny, really, that Marianne Elliott’s National Theatre production opened Sunday night at the Neil Simon Theatre, a Broadway venue named for the act of laughing to assuage pain. Funny, because even though we now know that the protagonist Prior Walter was right when he said, of gay men like himself in the throws of a plague, “We are not going away,” you do not look at this expansively anxious dramatic vista of the anxiety of Americans in the early 1990s, be they Jewish, gay, homosexual, Mormon or some combination thereof, and think to yourself, well, this is better now, or we’ve all finally agreed upon that.

Sure, the world has only spun forward since Kushner’s incomparable opus was first produced here in totem — when, wrestling with his young neuroses about the incompatibility of socialism, religiosity and personal happiness, he unleashed our own. But back in 1991, when he first wrestled with Prior and his chatty but unreliable lover Louis, the shell-shocked Mormons Joe, Harper and Hannah Pitt, the nurse Belize, and all the other fervent figures, real and historical, marauding around Gotham and sloshing in their creator’s funeral-scarred head, Kushner was noting forces gravitational and electromagnetic, the nonsentient motion of the quantum world. He never was implying we soon would be happier, kinder, fairer, more evolved. Nope. He never said we would be less riven by the division between smug centrists with their gods, and whiny deconstructionists with their fears of death.

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And Kushner surely would not have anticipated a moment when an audience would look out on Nathan Lane’s feral interpretation of the infamous closeted lawyer Roy M. Cohn, whose machinations and death from AIDS hovers over this play like a macabre crow, and say, well, here is one who directly influenced our sitting president in his most formative years.

But, in fact, as you watch Lane, carrying all these hours of theater mostly on his own back, biting into Cohn, first with crackling, lip-smacking relish, then with the pallid-gray skin tones of one about to expire from the wearying and Sisyphean effort of staying powerful as flesh weakens, that is precisely what you do think.

Cohn plays to all Lane’s tragicomic strengths; and where the evil one does not, Lane unpacks a few you did not even know he had. Ergo, Lane is extraordinary in a staging that, in some other ways, too badly wants to pull a text that still demands to be at the center of the political discourse in the direction of the theatrically quixotic. But first a caveat: It is dangerous to love a play as I love this play, and remember a staging, as I remember this original staging. Resistance to change is as dangerous as it is inevitable, which, come to think of it, was one of Kushner’s main points.

Be that as it may, it is not as if “Angels” was in need of a refreshment. The world got there first.

I struggled all the long day with Elliott’s decisions regarding the famous angel, who does not here crash through the ceiling, even though a giant hole in the upper vistas of Ian MacNeil’s otherwise low-rise setting (the abiding aesthetic is of the crowded Gotham apartment or coked-up dance-club, hopeful neon concealing the lack of actual space) suggests she will. Rather, her angelic self, played by Amanda Lawrence, requires some assembly before use, by puppeteers, or, as the program has them, Angel Shadows. Actually, her ultimate look, both in “Millennium Approaches” (Part One) and “Perestroika” (Part Two), is more avian than angelic.

This wrongly mitigates the potential potency of loving transformation, a key theme in the plays, if only the characters can actually decide on what the spiritual really means to them, beyond their desire to feast at the buffet table of relativity. Thanks to the fiery Lawrence, the angel becomes a force field, sure, but she is denied the chance to truly take control. If you can’t replace imminent death with orgasmic life, then you are not really a Kushner-friendly angel.

Andrew Garfield, the other excellent American-born star in a mostly British cast, takes theatrical command of Prior in a way that initially jars, but ultimately elevates the character, away from bitterness and immediate disappointment, more toward narrative omnipotence. By “Perestroika,” it actually feels like Prior has stepped away from his own body and time. Lane may have the most dominant performance, but Garfield’s revisionist and ennobling work is perhaps the most conceptually successful element of this new production.

Elsewhere, actors have their moment. As Louis, James McArdle is entertainingly loquacious, but you’re not taken in enough by the apparent genuineness of his tears to fully feel the harm he does. Lee Pace reads as too old for Joe Pitt, one of Roy’s boys. He’s a fine actor, but you don’t see any fork left on his Reaganomic road. Denise Gough, who plays Harper, and Susan Brown (Hannah) both are hugely empathetic and very much like denizens of the 1990s, and Brown is genuinely moving in Part Two. But they don’t really read as Mormon, which might sound like a reductive criticism, and it is, but it has something to do with how, in this great play, the darkness of doubt and the pain of realization must be preceded by a clear light in the eyes, flowing from the lost optimism of the all-American West.